A Narnia of Biblical Proportions

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Like the Apostle Paul, Lewis so much wanted his readers to grasp the real and eternal invisible world just out of sight of our visible but passing one. In the Chronicles, Lewis uses good and bad magic to portray the spiritual forces of good and evil at work�and to remind us that good always triumphs. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Only through Aslan�s good �magic� work at the Stone Table is evil magic defeated.

One could argue that it is the belief system the author embraces which makes the most important difference. Today, kids are captivated by series like Lemony Snicket�s A Series of Unfortunate Events (which the author wrote to challenge readers� expectations of happy endings in stories and in life) and Philip Pullman�s His Dark Materials series (which is overtly anti-Christian). While these authors use fantasy for the same reason Lewis did�to bring readers closer to the truth they hold dear�it�s fair to say that their version of �truth� is not guided by a Christian perspective.

Even so, it�s not especially helpful to label books �bad� or �good.� The pessimism of Unfortunate Events might completely undo one child while compelling another to share his hope in Christ with any hopeless people he befriends. Pullman�s series might strip one child of her faith while preparing another for a future as a Christian apologist. At the heart of the issue is the Christian parents understanding of fantasy literature�a genre where good and evil are played out by fictional characters in a pretend world.

But some Christians still question whether fantasy is ever okay. Some condemn the fantasy genre as being childish, deceitful, of scaring children and promoting escapism. Lewis had little patience for this kind of condemnation. In his essay �On Writing for Children,� Lewis wrote: �About once every hundred years some wiseacre gets up and tries to banish the fairy tale,� he wrote, as if irritated that this kind of argument against �the kind [of story] I know and love best� would keep rearing its head.

If Christians embrace Narnia and reject Potter, we hope they do so after careful thought. The truth is that Christian children of overzealous �fantasy is bad� parents might eventually be conditioned to reject Lewis�s imaginative traditions. If so, it�s possible that Christian fantasy as a genre read by Christians is dying, and the books we have from Lewis and Tolkien are among the last of a tradition that Dante helped set in motion. If that ever happens, the loss would be immeasurable.

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